I probably should have bumped this up to 3 stars, as I didn't really dislike this book as much as I was annoyed by it.

It has a very gimmicky premise, which can best be summed up with the tagline from Tom Cruise's movie from last summer: "live, die, repeat." For about the first third of the book, I got the impression that the author did not really have an idea for a full-length novel and decided to cheat by replaying the same events over and over (and over) with only slight variations.

It almost goes without saying that there was a LOT of repetition, particularly at the beginning. The first quarter could have been cut in half. It wasn't necessary to replay her birth each time she died before the age of 10. And then toward the middle of the book, the repeated lives that ended in the neighborhood of the London apartment, with very few changes to each life. It really got tedious. And despite all the repetition, you'd think at some point there would have been a reveal of a few mysteries. Who was the man with Sylvie in London? Who was the little girl they found that cold morning? Who was the man with the limp? What happened to Izzy's baby?

Now that I've finished it, it feels less gimmicky than it did at the start, and I think I would have liked it much better with some serious editing - eliminate the repetitions that were almost identical and just stick with the three or four most divergent stories. And for God's sake, give it an ending! Happy or tragic, I don't care, but don't leave it to the imagination that it all starts over again!